“Legacy Systems” are the biggest roadblock for businesses to prosper in the globalized digital world of today. They are hesitant to conduct legacy migrations due to the potential risks associated with legacy migration processes. The fact is: “risks associated with legacy systems are quite higher than the risks associated with legacy system modernization.”
Increased Operational Costs
Most of the programming languages or technologies used in legacy systems are extinct. Maintenance of legacy systems are very costly and difficult. You must have a skilled resource person in these old technologies, which can be difficult, and the maintenance and resolving of issues is costly. It is observed that close to 80 percent of the Federal agency's budget is spent on legacy systems maintenance, (most of the systems are 50 years old ) rather than investing in developing new capabilities.
Moreover, acclimating legacy systems to meet the demands of the dynamic business application environment is a deadly task or at times may be impossible. Combined, this can skyrocket the operational and maintenance costs.
Destabilized Software Ecosystem
The outdated legacy systems offer no flexibility to the software ecosystem to stay in tune with varying business logic. The effect of this would pose a huge threat, inducing a lack of agility in response generation (critical systems) and performance overheads. This is mainly due to the failure of outdated software architecture to establish synchronization between software operations and development. This results in creating disparities among the various enterprise services. Time-To-Market and product development life cycle, eventually creating an adverse impact on the overall sales scores.
Legacy systems failing to adapt contemporary software engineering practices in coding is inducing a substantial number of bugs. This may result in the breakdown of the system and resulting in business losses.
Inconsistencies in Data
Data is the key to any business strategy. The enterprise legacy system’s data models being loosely coupled are resulting in data inconsistency across various enterprise systems and services. Despite having huge volumes of data, enterprises are failing to get intelligence from this data to promote better business decisions.
As an outcome one other problem is data silos, which is the biggest roadblock to business operations. These data silos have a direct impact on data accountability, data integrity, business productivity, and finally resulting in failure of overall business logic.
Cyber Security Issues Costs Heavily
The inconsistencies in the business infrastructure, lack of harmony between various business applications, outdated security framework and lack of stringent governing security policies in the legacy systems are opening doors for more vulnerabilities for hackers to launch a cyber attack. These security setbacks and lack of cybersecurity readiness of the business systems could result in data losses and lost revenues. Moreover, accommodating new security capabilities/patches to the legacy systems can be very difficult.
The recent ransomware WannaCry attack was a wake up call for all businesses with legacy systems as they were the primary target. The biggest cyber-attack on NHS trusts is because they were using old legacy systems (including computers and medical equipment), and were not following even basic security policies to protect their systems, stated Mr. Amyas Morse, Head, National Audit Office.
(Want to get an free cybersecurity assessment? Get in contact with our experts!)
Lost Customer Satisfaction
The modern industrial revolution is driven by an experience-as-a-service model, and has customer satisfaction as the key aspect of any business model. Modern customer experiences are guided by the digital platforms. Due to the incompetency of legacy business architectures it would be impossible to ensure same digital experiences across various disparate systems. This would lead to customer unhappiness and ultimately would result in lost business credibility.
(Find out how voice assistant VERA can generate great customer experiences!)
Poor Supply Chain Management Process
The legacy systems failure in ensuring harmony among various intra and inter functional systems (like design, planning, execution, control, and monitoring) is damaging to the principles guiding the supply chain management. Legacy systems fail to deploy strong procedures in financial and regulatory management which leads to a complete collapse of the SCM concept and ERP too.
Conclusion
Change is an unavoidable entity in the evolutionary process and is the only thing that is constant in this world. Staying reluctant to change is a mere non-existence state. To position your businesses more successfully in the digitally empowered global market, modernizing your legacy systems is must. To modernize your legacy systems, go for the digital transformation solution; to stay relevant and ahead of your competitors! If you are looking for expert help, get a free assessment!
